If you find that you start a number of stories or pieces that you don’t ever bother finishing, that you lose interest or faith in them along the way, it may be that there is nothing at their center about which you care passionately.
The act of writing turns out to be its own reward.
A big heart is both a clunky and a delicate thing; it doesn’t protect itself and it doesn’t hide.
Late Fragment And did you get what you wanted from this life even so? I did. And what did you want? To call myself beloved, to feel myself beloved on the earth. RAYMOND CARVER.
The very first thing I tell my new students on the first day of a workshop is that good writing is about telling the truth. We are a species that needs and wants to understand who we are.
Remember that you own what happened to you.
In many spiritual and wisdom paths, it is written that God created us to have company and to be God’s loving eyes and hands on earth. But in certain African Christian catechisms it says that God created us because He thought we would like it.
We have to make ourselves available to one another, or we can’t experience goodness. It’s not so much us seeking God, tracking Her down with a butterfly net; it’s agreeing to be found. The Old Girl reaches out to everyone and wants to include us in this beautiful, weird, sometimes anguished life. All people: go figure.
Robert Burns said it best: “Life is but a day at most.
You must learn about people from people, not from what you read. Your reading should confirm what you’ve observed in the world.
To be a good writer, you not only have to write a great deal but you have to care.
We live stitch by stitch, when we’re lucky. If you fixate on the big picture, the whole shebang, the overview, you miss the stitching.
I’m not sure I even recognize the ever-presence of mercy anymore, the divine and the human; the messy, crippled, transforming, heartbreaking, lovely, devastating presence of mercy. But I have come to believe that I am starving to death for it, and my world is, too.
So try to calm down, get quiet, breathe, and listen.
Once you know where true is, it defines everything else that has to happen.
As well as we know our grown children and relatives, we don’t know how much energy they have to put into simply keeping their lives together at all.
Is it okay to be a tiny tiny bit tired of Caitlyn? Yes, was very brave but so far he’s gone from man to mannequin, instead of man to woman.
If you stop trying to control your mind so much, you’ll have intuitive hunches about what this or that character is all about.
Will call him a she when the pee-pee is gone. Says “Brave is to endure stares, jeers, prejudice. He won’t.
If you’re lost in the forest, let the horse find the way home.